Most of the audio conversion tools or the sound recorders you will need will also allow you to save the output audio file in various formats. MP3, WAV, OGG or any other, it’s your choice. Each one has its good parts and its bad parts.
But besides choosing the output format, you usually have the possibility to choose the output parameters too. The most common audio parameters for the digitally created files are the bitrate, the channels mode and the sample rate.
These parameters are the ones that will lead to a higher sound quality or to a lower one, depending on how you select them. Usually, an audio file created with a lower sound quality will have the advantage to be smaller. The sample rate is the parameter that causes this situation.
Anyway, when it comes to the output parameters, some of these software tools - audio converters, editors or recorders – will let you choose directly between sound quality and file size, specifying this interdependence. But some others, unfortunately many of them, will just put you in front of choosing the sample rate, the bitrate and the channels, without telling you a thing about what these mean, despite the fact these tools pretend themselves to be “user-friendly”, “easy to use”, etc.
Well, now you know a higher sample rate means a higher sound quality, but also a larger file size. You’ve probably already guessed that a higher bitrate also leads to a better sound quality. What else could be useful to know is that some audio software use “frequency” or “sampling rate” instead of “sample rate”, but they were probably trying to point the same thing.
As you’ve probably already noticed while using some of these tools, the sample rate is measured in Hertz (Hz), meaning cycles per second, or Kilohertz (kHz) - thousand of cycles per second. The most common sample rates are of 11, 22 or 44 kHz. Most of the recording softwares or other audio softwares that leads to the creation of a new audio file support sample rates from 6 kHz up to 192 kHz.
What exactly is the sample rate? It appeared at the same time with the digital recording. The analog recording didn’t involved the sample rate as the sound wave was recorded entirely and continuously, from its beginning to its ending.
While in analog recording the sound was recorded completely and continuously, the digital recording involved the “samples”, which are pretty much nothing else than the dots along the sound wave, the number of times per second you get a piece of audio information during the recording. This number of samples per each second is the “sampling rate”. To better understand this, think of a movie. A really low video frame rate would make a video look pretty bad, flickered, discontinuous, with jittery motion. The images won’t run smoothly, one after another, but would look like a fast image slideshow, in the worst case scenario, of course. That’s pretty much the same with the sound and the sample rate, but of course, much harder to notice. Anyway, a higher sample rate just leads to a higher audio detail.
Wondering what sample rate should an audio file have? A CD quality audio has a sample rate of 44100Hz (stereo sampling). For every one minute of music this means something like about 10 MB of disk space. For an MP3 audio file a sample rate of 22kHz would be passable. But, of course, the higher, the better. Especially if the file size is not a matter that concerns you.
Tags: sample rate, sampling rate, frequency, sound quality, audio quality, Hz, Hertz, Khz, audio parameters, recording, record, convert, conversion, audio editor, stereo, digital, cycle, sample, mp3, wav, ogg, channel, channels, bitrate, rate.
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